16 New York Gallery Shows Where You’ll Find Exciting Young Artists This October

By Casey Lesser

Sep 30, 2016 5:53 pm

From Chelsea to Bushwick, a strong showing of young artists fill New York’s galleries this fall, spanning fresh figurative paintings, embroidered wall-hangings, and an installation that imagines a robot society.

Sep. 10–Oct. 23, 170 Suffolk Street

Pozanti, whose most recent work investigates the impact of technology on humans, is known for her vibrant 31-character alphabet of organic shapes, dubbed “Instant Paradise,” which she deploys in paintings, sculptures, and animations. In this show, the Turkish, New York-based artist presents paintings on sunshades that balance the hand of the artist with mass-produced aesthetics, and an animation drawn from a chat session with an artificial intelligence bot.

Olivia Erlanger at Mathew

Sep. 16–Oct. 18, 47 Canal Street

Installation view of Olivia Erlanger at Mathew. Photo courtesy of the artist and Mathew.

The New York artist shows sculptural works reminiscent of building facades, but instead of windows and doors we find sheets of fabric, a chess board, or an exit sign accented with bits of porcelain, honeycomb, and printed silk. Across her body of work, Erlanger draws parallels between natural disasters and fluctuations in financial markets.

Sep. 8–Oct. 22, 513 West 20th Street & 524 West 24th Street

In his first solo shows in New York, which span both of the gallery’s Chelsea spaces, the Botswana-born, New York-based artist shows large-scale paintings from his “Democratic Intuition” series. The ongoing body of work, begun in 2014, explores ideas of democracy and its efficacy in southern Africa. While the 24th Street show, “Comrades II,” draws on the African liberation movements and communism, “Lerato,” on 20th Street, employs allegory and lerato, the Setswana concept that best translates as “love.”

Nov. 3–Dec. 9, 106 Eldridge Street

Image courtesy of Brad Troemel and Tomorrow.

Inspired by the exorbitant cost of art storage, as well as geocaching—described as a “real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices”—Troemel has hidden a series of artworks in Central Park. Protected in vacuum-seal packaging, the works can only be found with the knowledge of their exact GPS coordinates. In the corresponding gallery show, titled “Freecaching,” Troemel presents arrangements of wooden blocks that hold the GPS coordinates and serve as certificates that authenticate the hidden works.

Sep. 8–Oct. 29, 520 West 20th Street

In figurative paintings brimming with crisp, flat forms and bold outlines (evoking sign painting as well as the works of John Wesley), Keogh portrays headless female bodies that have been bisected at the waist, an empty suit of armor, and flowery vines that weave in and out of swords. While reflecting on the way artists represent their subjects, she also questions one’s ability to represent self through artmaking.

Sep. 25–Oct. 22, 88 East Broadway #B11

Previously known for mixed-media paintings (seen last year at Mier Gallery in L.A.), the Brooklyn-born artist debuts a single, large-scale sculpture that is intended to appear too large for the tiny, one-room gallery. A large wooden beam hovers above a leopard-printed stool, held up by cast-aluminum rods, and feels at once playful and primordial.

Sep. 17–Oct. 23, 97 Allen Street

In radical wall-mounted textiles Narrett challenges the aged associations between embroidery and femininity, filling her works with distinctly contemporary, psychologically charged scenarios. Her dreamy, finely woven narratives often feature female protagonists—nude women hooked up to IVs of orange juice mingle in a garden; a morose woman carries groceries; a naked, blindfolded blonde spreads her legs atop a pool table—most of which are inspired by personal experiences.

Cole Sayer at JTT

Sep. 10–Oct. 16, 170a Suffolk Street

Installation view of “Cole Sayer: Wicked.” Photo courtesy of the artist and JTT, New York.

Sayer’s second show with JTT is inspired by literary villains and the notion of “perceptual shift,” which the artist describes as “the moment you can feel you’ve changed your mind.” The Nashville-born, New York-based artist plays with our ever-shifting opinions and perceptions of reality in optical, textural paintings made with flashe and gesso and undulating figurative sculptures—squashed heads, couples jogging—made in foam with such precision that Sayer’s hand is almost imperceptible.

Sep. 15–Oct. 31, 535 West 22nd Street

In a series of photographs of her nude self, Chetrit presents a fresh take on self-portraiture that leaves viewers feeling voyeuristic. Employing multiple cameras, mirrors, and revealing clothing, she presents herself from various angles, be it a shot of her intertwined with her partner, a closeup of her privates, or a vertical of her bare legs as her feet fondle a camera on a tripod.

“Ousia” at Unisex Salon

Sep. 17–Oct. 22, 133 Manhattan Avenue

The four young female artists feature in this new show are brought together through their explorations in material. Highlights include photographs of Berglund’s terra cotta tiles, made earlier this year when she built a dance floor in wet clay in the backyard at Orgy Park in Bushwick, and Denniston’s series of spheres made by hand from bricks.

Sara Deraedt at Essex Street

Oct. 13–Nov. 13, 114 Eldridge Street

Over the past decade the Brussels-based Deraedt has walked the streets of her hometown and the shopping malls of Hong Kong, camera in hand, with an eye for product displays in storefront windows. She often re-photographs the same displays (a vacuum cleaner, a leather office chair), which can remain unchanged over the course of years. Though she rarely exhibits her work, Deraedt’s shows are careful, conceptual installations that represent many years of work, and often involve site-specific interventions.

Oct. 13–Nov. 27, 154 Ludlow Street

Russian duo Andrey Blokhin and Georgy Kuznetsov have focused their innovative practice on creating sculpture from recyclable materials (plastic bags, old car tires, defunct gadgets) resulting in distinctly contemporary works that challenge the art-historical canon. Their new show, “Detected Reality,” examines the impact of technology on society, presenting a matrix environment where humans are meant to see through the viewpoint of the machine.

Oct. 14–Nov. 13, 57 Stanton Street

The Canadian artist’s works are as much about drawing and sculpture as the frames, boxes, and other custom elements through which they are presented. Among various series on view are works made from the dust in his Los Angeles studio, collected from a vacuum cleaner and mounted on custom plexi frames; drawings scrawled with every color in a box of pastels; and ink and graphite polychromed sculptures that are intricately carved and made to resemble paint cans.

Sep. 15–Oct. 22, 254 West 23rd Street #2

Installation view of Kyle Thurman, “A Lonely Butcher.” Photo courtesy of the artist and Off Vendome.

In November 2015, Thurman began producing one drawing each day, all based on images found in the news. In the current show, he presents several of these drawings, which he’s enlarged to human scale to reflect on the rate at which we consume information we find online and how it transforms when removed from its original context.

For their first show with Mitchell-Innes & Nash, the eight-member artist collective expands on its recent Berlin Biennale installation. In Chelsea, a room filled with sand features a misshapen running track that twists around a sculpture showing a mother performing non-contact touch therapy on her child. In this work, the artists, each of whom has ties to the Arabian Gulf region, explore wellness and lifestyle trends in the Middle East and the way these positive energy and healing methods are co-opted by the government—as in the UAE’s recent creation of a “Ministry of Happiness” position.

Oct. 13–Nov. 13, 83 Grand Street

The Symbolist paintings of 19th-century French artist Henri Fantin-Latour, sentiments of queer culture, and hints of Rococo, Film Noir, and the theatricality of Caravaggio have inspired the New York artist’s new figurative paintings. Mining his source imagery from the internet—jpegs of a happy dolphin and Catwoman licking her paw among them—McKinniss paints his subjects in slick oils, incorporating into each work the versatile purple pigment Egyptian Violet, which has inspired the show’s title.